The Skinny On Online Marketing Promotion

By Simon Natta • March 31st, 2009

There are a bunch of misconceptions when it comes to online marketing strategies. Beginners in the field can easily fall prey to appalling internet marketing strategies that promise instant results. The thing is, “instant” doesn’t always mean long lasting. They can’t guarantee sure profits either. Some of these internet marketing activities might raise the number of hits to your website, but they won’t automatically bring in the cash.

Knowing your SEO hats

Article marketing makes up a big chunk of online marketing promotion. Businesses online rely on websites, and the blood work of all websites is content. You need to keep your content relevant if you want to attract customers. However, customers are not the only ones you need to write for.

To increase the page ranking of your website in popular search engines and directories, you must keep your content optimized. This means knowing how to place the correct amount of keywords inside the article. These “keywords” or key phrases will subsequently be indexed by search engine “spiders”. Since these spiders are software, they can’t initially gauge the quality of your articles depending on the significance of information included in it. Most pages are ranked on search engines because the correct keywords are frequently mentioned in the same article.

While this is good for the search engine, being too redundant in the article (e.g. saying the word “hormonal imbalance” 30 times in a 500-word article) is annoying for the human reader. Keyword stuffing this extreme is also referred to as “black hat SEO” or bad SEO. While this may produce top page ranking quickly, you can also lose your position in no time once your irrelevant content was “discovered” by human editors.

Some people use the phrase “white hat SEO” for article marketing that is more focused on human readers than search engine spiders. However, no online marketing tactic today can claim to be entirely white hat SEO. Because of the tight competition of businesses online, companies are bound to make use of a little black hat SEO trick one in a while, but likely not to the extent that they’re risking being expelled from the search engines.

The most common form of article marketing today uses some gray hat SEO strategies, which is a well balanced scheme that considers both the human readers and the search engine spiders.

Email marketing morals

If you are personally annoyed at spam mails, then you might instantly want to eliminate email marketing from your list. You shouldn’t do this just yet. Email marketing is a valuable internet marketing strategy if you know how to do it correctly.

Sending out advertisements and newsletters to a indiscriminate number of email addresses will not help you gain customers. Instead, you’ll be putting all your hard work in someone else’s trash bin. Think about your target viewers instead. Don’t just blast your advertisements everywhere.

What you are looking for here is a list that is more focused on quality, not quantity. A targeted list of 20 consumers, or potential clients, is more effective than 200 strangers who might just see your unsolicited newsletter as an annoyance.

Getting the list right

Targeted lists can be created from databases on your website. People who visit your website could simply drop a line, and voluntarily give out their email addresses where you can send product catalogues, newsletters, and whatever that is related to your product.

If you are a conventional business who also trades offline, you can acquire emails during tradeshows. If you have a shop somewhere in the city, you can invite your clients to fill out a small survey form, which also asks for their email addresses. It can be a plain line at the bottom saying: “Would you like to be updated about our latest products? Tell us where we can find you on the web so we can drop a line.”

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